"Trust in political parties has never been lower, but we have more and more of them, to the point where voters need magnifying sheets to read ballot papers. What is the relationship between party regulation and the nature of our democracy? How is it that parties have been able to gather so many public resources yet with so little scrutiny of their affairs? This is the first book on party regulation in Australia. It covers a wide range of issues, from party donations to candidate selection, from expectations of parties in a representative democracy to the reluctance to regulate and the role of the courts where legislators fear to tread. ‘The regulation of political parties is one of the most important, but unexplored areas of Australian electoral policy. This important book fills that gap in providing a stimulating and insightful analysis of the pitfalls and potential solutions in this area.’&#xD;— Professor George Williams AO"

This book provides a detailed historical analysis of the Swiss Parliament. It sheds light on how the profiles of parliamentarians have evolved over a century, and recounts the various legislative reforms affecting their status. The author analyses the impact of these reforms on the collective biography of the members of Parliament. The rich data allow for an empirically grounded reflection on how well the parliamentary composition represents the population, for instance in terms of their gender or level of education, and an understanding of the processes of democratization and professionalization of the institution. This research has received a prize from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lausanne and an incentive award from the Swiss Society for Parliamentary Questions. Andrea Pilotti has a PhD in Political Sciences from the University of Lausanne. He is Research Manager at the Research Observatory for Regional Politics and member of the Swiss Elite Observatory at the University of Lausanne’s Faculty of Social and Political sciences.

In the lead essay for this volume, Joshua Foa Dienstag engages in a critical encounter with the work of Stanley Cavell on cinema, focusing sceptical attention on the claims made for the contribution of cinema to the ethical character of democratic life. In this debate, Dienstag mirrors the celebrated dialogue between Rousseau and Jean D'Alembert on theatre, casting Cavell as D'Alembert in his view that we can learn to become better citizens and better people by observing a staged representation of human life, with Dienstag arguing, after Rousseau, that this misunderstands the relationship between original and copy, even more so in the medium of film than in the medium of theatre. The argument is developed further by essays from Clare Woodford, Tracy B. Strong, Margaret Kohn, Davide Panagia and Thomas Dunn, to which Dienstag responds in the concluding chapter, 'A reply to my critics'.

"This book argues that John Dewey should be read as a philosopher of globalization rather than as a 'local' American philosopher. Although Dewey's political philosophy was rooted in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, it was more importantly about the role of America in a globalized world. In returning to, and recovering the neglected global dimensions of Dewey's political philosophy, the book highlights how his insights about globalization and democracy can inform present theoretical debates. John Narayan traces the emergence of Dewey as a global democrat through an examination of his work from The public and its problems (1927) onwards. Narayan shows how Dewey sets out an evolutionary form of global and national democracy in his work, that has not been fully appreciated even by contemporary scholars of pragmatism, and which offers valuable lessons for the twenty-first century and for our own hopes for global democracy."

This book proposes a new institution — the ‘People’s Forum’ — to enable democratic governments to effectively address long-running issues like global warming and inequality. It would help citizens decide what strategic problems their government must fix, especially where this requires them to suffer some inconvenience or cost. The People’s Forum is first based on a new diagnosis of government failure in democracies. The book tests its own analyses of government failure by seeing whether these might help us to explain the failures of particular democracies to address (and in some cases, to even recognize) several crucial environmental problems. The essential features of a new design for democracy are described and then compared with those of previous institutional designs that were also intended to improve the quality of democratic government. In that comparison, the People’s Forum turns out to be not only the most effective design for developing and implementing competent policy, but also the easiest to establish and run. The latter advantage is crucial as there has been no success in getting previous designs into actual trial practice. It is hoped that this book may inspire a small group to raise the money to set up and run the People’s Forum. Then, as citizens see it operating and engage with it, they may come to regard the new Forum as essential in helping them to deliberate long-running issues and to get their resulting initiatives implemented by government. Smith also discusses how the People’s Forum must be managed and how groups with different political ideologies may react to it. An Afterword sets out the method by which this design was produced, to help those who might want to devise an institution themselves. The new concepts in environmental science that the book develops to test its diagnosis are applied in an Appendix to outline crucial options for the future of Tasmania. Similar options apply to many countries, states and provinces. As indicated above, those choices are currently beyond the capacity of democratic governments to address and in some cases, even to recognize. But the People’s Forum may lift them out of that morass.

The Constitution of 1 May 1934 saw an attempt made in Austria to create an alternative to parliamentary democracy in the form of an order based on the professional “Stand” (corporation). The failure of this attempt was due to the nature of the “Stand” itself which, as something organically grown, is not accessible to institutionalisation. In reality, the corporation was just a means of enabling conservative thinking, in a much wider sense, to influence politics, a hangover of traditional forms of rule.

Across the world, more and more DIY initiatives are cropping up, in which a diversity of matters and problems are being collectively dealt with. In these collaborative contexts – located away from the market and the state - an understanding of living together and urbanity based around democracy is tested out, and at the same time, ecologically and socially responsible solutions are being sought for fundamental forms of provision of food, of energy, and for making all manner of technology accessible. In the process, fascinating new forms of collective production, repairing and swapping arise which challenge the industrial logic of the 20th century, even turn them on their head. This book is dedicated to the visionary power of these promising innovative practices, and at the same time, provides a societal categorisation of the new `laboratories' of societal transformation. With photographs by Falk Messerschmidt.

This work depicts Otto Bauer as the main politician of the SDAP and attempts a critical-analytical interpretation of his socio-political theories, which are shown against the background of the debates within the First and Second Internationals, political events within the SDAP, the international workers' movement, and the socio-historical processes in Austria and Europe at the time.